Scores of children and babies have been locked up in filthy prison cells in Harare as Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president, sinks to new depths in his campaign to force the opposition into exile before an expected run-off in presidential elections.
Twenty-four babies and 40 children under the age of six were among the 250 people rounded up in a raid on Friday, according to Nelson Chamisa, spokesman for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Yesterday they were crammed into cells in Southerton police station in central Harare.
“This is ruthlessness of the worst kind. How can you incarcerate children whose mothers have fled their homes hoping to give their children refuge?” asked an emotional Chamisa yesterday. “In Mugabe’s Zimbabwe even children are not spared the terror that befalls their parents.”
The families were rounded up from MDC headquarters, where they had sought refuge from violence in the countryside.
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This is what terror regimes do. From Robespierre, through Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, to Hitler, then Mao and Pol Pot and all the rest. They rule by being insanely ruthless. And intellectuals dress up their depravity in the clothes of ideology. Republican Radicalism, Communism, Nazism, Anti-colonialism, Wahabism -- they're all the same, excuses for perpetrating acts of terror in the name of the common good.
